It has nothing to do with baseball per se. There's a cyclical fifteen minutes of fame for everything, and perhaps this is baseball's off time. It will return and go away again.

Meanwhile, do you or anyone else around here ever play "kings"? For the benefit of the uninitiated, it's a checkers variant. You start with six kings each, lined up at opposite corners of the board. You can make complicated moves by jumping your own men foreward, backward, any which way. The game is fast and fun... and very few people seem to know about it anymore. I tried to introduce it to my chess club, but no one there had ever seen it before--not even the kids.

You use an ordinary checkerboard, and the Kings are positioned [here I shift to chess terminology to make it easier] on g1, h2, e1,f2, g3, and h4 for one side and a8, b7, d8, c7, b6, and a5. They move either in the ordinary way, one square at a time, or move by jumping their own and their opponents' men, the opposing jumpees (to coin a word) being considered captured, and removed from the board. The player who eliminates all the other's men is the winner.

click for larger view

I assume White's legal moves in this position would be e1-d2, f2-e3, g3-f4, h4-g5, and the jumps g1=e3 and h2=f4. Moves like g1-c1 and h2-h6 would not be possible.

Looks like the equivalent of Fool's Mate would be 1.g3-f4 b8=d6 2.e1-d2 c7=e5=g3=e1=c3, when White loses three kings in one swell foop.

As evidence that the game is real, my wife just told me that she used to play Kings on the playground, too, long decades before we ever met.

<Ohio Chess Fan> Did you grow up in Ohio? (That would indicate Kings was known nationwide--yes?)

Carl Pavano leaves the game after 8 leading 2-0, having given up four hits. You'd think that's a pretty sure win, right? Nathan gives up two in the ninth, and bye-bye winning pitcher.

And I don't Pavano's situation at that time, but why take him out after eight anyway if he's going so great? I don't see it as a great strategy if the plan is to bring in the closer in any relatively close game, no matter how well the starter is pitching.

In any case, the first batter hit a bloop double down the rightfield line that normally would have been caught, except the rightfielder was playing very deep and toward center. The announcers said, "You have to protect against the extra base hit in this situation."

It seems to me that's entirely untrue. A single or a double or even a home run is the same in that situation, except for the small advantage of keeping the double play open with just a single. But that run means nothing. The Twins needed to be playing to get the out no matter what, ignoring the chances of a big hit.

http://books.google.com/books?id=LS...

Now, the problem with this account is that the game was in the middle of a three-week stretch when Simmons didn't play at all; it wasn't just one day off. Here's the box score, from August 23:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...

And his Simmons' game log from 1931:

http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/...